By the time Kendra was 15, she was abusing drugs, "feeling suicidal" and "cutting myself," she says. After Kendra admitted to swallowing a "a half dozen or so medications" at school, her mother Patti decided to check her in for two weeks at a secured psychiatric facility.

"It was crazy in that place," Baskett tells THS. "We didn't see daylight. We weren't allowed outside. It was basically a jail, but it was a hospital."

Her grandmother, Mary, admits, "None of us had ever had a situation like that in the family. Her mother and I did a lot of crying."

Yet the future star's hospitalization "did not change me at all," Baskett says. "I think it made me worse because in my heart I didn't want to change. People were forcing me, and that's something that does not work with me."

By her sophomore year of high school, Baskett was a runaway. "I was still on drugs," she says. "I met a guy and I ended up running away with him."